There are enormous amounts of documents being processed frequently in private offices, educational institutions, public administrative offices, hospitals, and even homes. Usually, these documents have specific information fields, such as page numbers, language code, nationality information, region code, state code, country code, date, and the like, using which users manually sort or segregate the documents in a desired order. Examples of desired order include, but are not limited to, an ascending order, a descending order, alphabetically, or a combination thereof. The users can also sort/segregate the documents based on a multi-level criteria. For example, a set of documents can be first manually sorted by an ascending order of date and then alphabetically by country codes. Since the document sizes are usually large and the sorting activity is needed frequently, any sorting requires considerable amount of human effort to arrange and group the documents. Also, there are chances of human error while performing the sorting activity.
A multi-function device (MFD) provides multiple functionalities, such as printing, scanning, copying, faxing; all incorporated in a single device. These functionalities are now being extended to include document finishing related activities, such as sorting, collating, stacking, stapling, binding, stitching, folding, cutting, and hole punching. There exists a need to further extend the MFD's functionalities to automate the process of document sorting.